A system I can barely afford and may soon not be able to afford. Again I ask how is that a good thing? Did you notice how the article does not address people in my situation?

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Because the article is about healthy, young people. Are you either of these things?

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And that's the point. ACA will screw over people like me and families with children like me.

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No, it won't. You'll be eligible for insurance thru the exchanges.

As will I, when I retire at 60. And retirement at 60 means I can work the day job remotely from my farm, start my business on my farm, and produce a few jobs. Not a lot of jobs, but a few in an area that desperately needs every job it can produce.

I know quite a few people who plan to take the skills they've gained through a lifetime of working for someone else & start a business of their own. Few of us make it to 60 without a pre-existing condition that makes us uninsurable on the open market.

With a true universal healthcare system, we wouldn't be tied to those employers & would have been able to start our businesses earlier.

As for providers raising prices now... I've only heard anecdotal evidence on that. So I'll provide anecdotal evidence to the contrary: although 60 percent of our contracts are commercial & pay us on percentage of charges, we raised rates this year only on procedures where our charges were less than what Medicare pays or where the charge for a given procedure was inconsistent across the system. There's no reason a CT done in one location in a hospital system should be cheaper than the one done across the street. The patient doesn't get the choice of what scanner they're scheduled in, so charge discrepancies are unfair to the patient.

Because the article is about healthy, young people. Are you either of these things?

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And that's the point. ACA will screw over people like me and families with children like me.

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No, it won't. You'll be eligible for insurance thru the exchanges.

As will I, when I retire at 60. And retirement at 60 means I can work the day job remotely from my farm, start my business on my farm, and produce a few jobs. Not a lot of jobs, but a few in an area that desperately needs every job it can produce.

I know quite a few people who plan to take the skills they've gained through a lifetime of working for someone else & start a business of their own. Few of us make it to 60 without a pre-existing condition that makes us uninsurable on the open market.

With a true universal healthcare system, we wouldn't be tied to those employers & would have been able to start our businesses earlier.

As for providers raising prices now... I've only heard anecdotal evidence on that. So I'll provide anecdotal evidence to the contrary: although 60 percent of our contracts are commercial & pay us on percentage of charges, we raised rates this year only on procedures where our charges were less than what Medicare pays or where the charge for a given procedure was inconsistent across the system. There's no reason a CT done in one location in a hospital system should be cheaper than the one done across the street. The patient doesn't get the choice of what scanner they're scheduled in, so charge discrepancies are unfair to the patient.

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Here's my anecdata: I've had my employer-provided policy come up for renewal a couple times since Obamacare was passed. My employer doesn't cover very much of it, so any increases are felt by me pretty directly. Without giving exact amounts, here's how my insurance costs increased each year since 2009:

2010: 12.6% increase over 2009
2011: 15.5% increase over 2010 (a lot of that due to a switch to another insurance company)
2012: 7.8% increase over 2011

No word yet on what the 2013 rates will be like, though the rumblings I hear indicate it won't be a steep increase. Talking to my fellow employees, they were seeing at least 10%+ increases every year before Obamacare, too.

All that's happening now is insurers jacking up rates and blaming Obamacare for it, when in reality they'd have raised the rates regardless because that's the way the industry is going, for a whole host of reasons. I'm not saying the Affordable Care Act has had no impact on rates, but to singlehandedly blame them for all recent-year rate increases is just pure hogwash.

And that's the point. ACA will screw over people like me and families with children like me.

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That's such bullshit.

Every anecdote you've ever given over the years has the same through line: You getting by because of the contributions others have made (your family, church, doctors, community, wife's boss, other people at your insurance company) to your health care needs. You will never contribute enough to your own healthcare to pay for it. Never.

And ObamaCare is forcing healthy young people into the system, instead of having them wait until they're older and need more care? Well hot damn, who benefits in that system more than the people who do have serious needs?

Oh, wait. The truth is that rate increases have slowed since the ACA passed. Now, arguments can be made both for and against crediting the Affordable Care Act for that (I think I've got a handle on which side you'd take), but blaming the legislation for rate increases when they're actually at "historic lows" seems a bit off.

The cost of employer-sponsored family health insurance premiums jumped again this year, but the rate at which they rose slowed to historic lows, according to a new survey Tuesday.

For insured workers, the cost of buying health insurance for a family of four increased 4% to $15,745 in 2012, according to a survey conducted by Kaiser Family Foundation and the Health Research & Educational Trust.

Last year, premiums leaped 9% from the year before.

"These are strikingly low numbers to those of us who have been studying health costs for a long time," said Drew Altman, president of the Kaiser Family Foundation. "A 4% increase in health premiums is good news."

And that's the point. ACA will screw over people like me and families with children like me.

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That's such bullshit.

Every anecdote you've ever given over the years has the same through line: You getting by because of the contributions others have made (your family, church, doctors, community, wife's boss, other people at your insurance company) to your health care needs. You will never contribute enough to your own healthcare to pay for it. Never.

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As well as public assistance....

This is a disconnect I just don't understand. My SO was also a high-consumer of health care dollars. In the last year of his life, he racked up over $2 million in health care expenditures. He had both Medicare & MediCal--and was supremely grateful for that.

As he became ill at 23, no, he never paid into the system what he got out of it. But what was the option? Let him die on the streets? Or take him out into a field & shoot him? Because insurance here in the US is tied to work, he was dumped from his insurance plan as soon as he was unable to work. Public assistance was the only option.

If we'd had a single-payer system, the costs for him--and other high-consumers--would have been spread across the entire population, not just across a system paying for other high-cost consumers of medical care (i.e. the elderly & disabled).